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When the Peers All Think the Same

Academic peer review is a closed system that is self-policed by those with conflicts of interest, and it needs major reform.

Updated Aug. 5, 2014 5:02 p.m. ET

It is disappointing that the commercial science community was given little voice in the letters published July 19 responding to Hank Campbell's July 14 op-ed on the peer-review system. I was at the National Institutes for Health for 13 years, have published 252 peer-reviewed papers and founded four biotech companies in the past 25 years, so I have personally seen the costs to society in both dollars and lives of poorly vetted academic research.

Academic peer review is a closed system that is self-policed by those with conflicts...